Yesterday Frostfire announced the launch of Frostfirehive.com, a personal homepage application that’s initially designed to target Internet and technology users. Much like the way you can customize your Google homepage, Frostfirehive.com allows users to create personalized start pages. But, it also takes things a few steps further, making it easy to organize your news, websites, videos, games, photos, search engines, email and much more.

“We will see a move away from generic start pages as niches need guidance with their content. Single page aggregators are too rigid and generic customizable pages offer little help to users. The Frostfirehive.com default start page consists of basic instructions that can be removed once a user is familiar with the site,” said Chris Frost, Frostfirehive.com’s chief executive.

A newly released eyetracking study by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows that online banner blindness is worsening. Nielsen says that banner ads (indicated by green outlines in his heat maps below) didn’t even receive light focus from skimmers, scanners and readers—and neither did non-ad content in the same areas.

Nielsen concludes, much to his own dismay, that the best way to get people to look at your ads is to make them look like actual content—much like advertising in magazines and newspapers masquerades as editorial content (gotta look for that tiny little ‘advertisement’ notice at the top). That doesn’t mean, however, a 300×300 AdSense block as the first thing in your blog’s text will trick people into think that it’s content and clicking on it. That’s just annoying. (via)

Hitwise, a company that offers their clients from around the world insight on how customers interact with competitive websites, has just launched a new widget called Hitwise To Go. This new widget is the first in a series of widgets to be launched by Hitwise, and its RSS-based service will provide information about user behavior for the US, UK, and Asia Pacific markets.

“Releasing our data via desktop widgets makes it easy for digital enthusiasts to stay informed about key online trends as they happen. They also serve as a gateway to access a full archive of online statistics and other publicly available Hitwise data sources such as the Hitwise Analyst Blogs and our Data Center.” said Tessa Court, chief marketing officer for Hitwise.

If you had to add up all the time you spend online for your boss, how would you allocate it? The findings of a new study released from the Online Publishers Association might (or might not) surprise you. The study, conducted over the last four years by Nielson/NetRatings, found that Internet users are spending nearly half their time on content rich sites such as entertainment and news websites, with more time spent on this activity than shopping online, emailing, or searching on various search engines.

The abundance of content and faster online speeds accounted for the spike, the study said. A proliferation of social networks such as News Corps’ MySpace and Facebook have helped boost content viewing as well.